Let me explain what just happened.
English Heritage are a charity that cares for more than 400 historic sites around the
country and this year they're celebrating England's castles and telling some of their
stories.
And some of those stories are a bit explosive.
Jon what have we got here?
Well this is a working replica of an English Civil War mortar known as Roaring Meg.
The original was built in 1646 and unlike a cannon which shoots level, this is designed
to lob cannonballs over the walls of castles and then they would explode inside doing as
much damage as possible.
So we are actually going to blow something up?
That's the plan, yes.
We're going to load this with powder, we're going to shoot a cannonball out of it and
hopefully do some damage.
So cannonball fires, cannonball lands, cannonball blows up and does damage from inside?
That's the general plan, yes.
How much gunpowder are we using here?
Okay so we would normally use 4lb of powder in a hollow cannonball and then we'd use another
3 to 3.5lb of powder in the breach to launch the cannonball from the mortar.
And how accurate is this thing?
Can you hit a target with this?
They're not designed necessarily for hitting specific items but we're going to give it
a very good try.
We did think about firing this at a real castle but that's not a good idea so instead we're
going to use the British standard for destruction on camera.
Full disclosure: leaning into a cannon to light the fuse on a cannonball just before
it's going to blow is a little too risky for the 21st century so we're going to fire a
regular cannonball, and after it lands and crashes in our pyro team is going to replace
it with charges and blow those up.
But to you it will look seamless through the magic of editing.
You ready?
Alright you load, I'm going to retire to a safe distance.
Roaring Meg was an absolute monster.
We're here at Goodrich Castle to see the damage she did in the summer of 1646 during the Civil
War.
Unable to break the castle with conventional cannon, Colonel Birch called the blacksmith
of Goodrich nearby in the village to cast in iron in his forge a new big mortar and
that's Roaring Meg.
Roaring Meg could fire explosive shells, we think they weighed as much as 200lb, and basically
they were bombs.
They were full of gunpowder, they were spheres of iron with a lighted fuse inside and the
fuse was timed in such a way that the charge should go off as near as possible at the point
when the shell hits its target.
Just imagine, there you are you can see this thing being set up and you hear the ominous
sound of a whoomph!
as the charge goes off and the shell is on its way towards you, then there must have
been an unbearable silence waiting for it to hit followed by a deafening crash as the
shell goes off and then the damage of bits of iron being fired off in all directions.
Absolutely horrific.
During the Civil War, Roaring Meg concentrated her fire on this corner and reduced it to
what we see now.
For much of the circuit, the actual tower has completely been blown away and in the
scraps that survive you can see that some of the squared stone has been knocked off,
revealing the rough rubble of the core behind it.
When you look at the damage that a shell did to the castle behind me built of stone, imagining
that transferred to something flimsy like a caravan I can only imagine.
That was the plan.
Fire a cannonball, hit the caravan, blow up the caravan.
And full disclosure, we were just firing a regular cannonball we were going to tell you
that and then after it landed and smashed the caravan in, we were going to go in, replace
it with a mortar charge and blow it up.
So yeah we'd simulate a little but it was all above board.
Provided we could hit the caravan...
The reason it's difficult is because this isn't a cannon we're firing, it's a mortar.
It's not designed to go through a thing, it's designed to go over a castle wall and hit
somewhere inside a courtyard.
Trying to hit what is actually a pretty small target is really difficult.
But we did keep hitting the same target.
It just wasn't the caravan.
At one point we hit basically within 12 inches 5 times in a row.
So we moved the caravan to that position.
Yeah that didn't work either.
We had one shot left.
After that we were out of black powder, we had to hit it with this one.
We figured that was close enough and we still had the mortar charge so we figured for your
entertainment and for ours we'd blow up the caravan anyway.
If you want to know more about English Heritage or about their castles, click the link on
screen or in the description.